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John Quincy Adams and His Journal

The following is a piece from John Quincy Adams’s Journal in 1820, after speeches made on the Missouri Question (to be the Missouri Compromise).

Background: Adams was Secretary of State during the Monroe presidency. A man, whom he respected and worked closely with, John C. Calhoun, was Secretary of War in the same administration. They discussed the Missouri Question at length.

Adams Journal, 1820:
I had some conversations with Calhoun on the slave question pending in Congress. He said he did not think it would produce a dissolution of the Union, but if it should, the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain. I said that would be returning to the colonial state. He said, yes, pretty much, but it would be forced upon them.

I asked whether he thought, if by the effect of this alliance, offensive and defensive, the population of the north should be cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean [by the British], it would fall back upon its rocks, bound hand and foot to starve, or whether it would not retain its powers of locomotion by land. Then, he said, they would find it necessary to make their communities all military. [In other words, the South would fight the North if northerners forced their way south seeking relief from a British blockade].

I pressed the conversation no further: but if the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything that can be seen by futurity, that it most shortly afterwards would be followed by the universal emancipation of the slaves [presumably because of the military action to follow]. A more remote but perhaps not less certain consequence would be the extirpation of the African race on this continent, by the gradually bleaching process of intermixture, where the white portion is already so predominant, and by the destructive progress of emancipation which, like all great religious and political reformations, is terrible in its means though happy and glorious in its end.

“Arguing About Slavery,” William Lee Miller, 1995, p.186

Again, all of this is from 1820 – a full 40 years before the fact. I consider this a remarkable journal entry, and one that has an almost clairvoyant projection of the facts 40 years in the future. Imagine one of us trying to predict accurately the situation of immigration or health care 40 years in the future and coming this close to dead center.

This discussion pre-dates nearly all of the tariff issues and most state issues within the Civil War causation framework. And the force behind the opposing words is John C. Calhoun – one of the main architects of the southern response between 1830 and 1859. Abraham Lincoln was eleven years old at the time this was written.

Lincoln and Slavery Issues